“Willie Lin's debut poetry collection is everything one wants from a collection whether it be a debut, sophomore, or late career poet's publication. Each poem—I mean each poem—is immediate, energetic, complex yet accessible, and masterfully composed. Lin at once reveals and withholds, brings us into the imagined world while residing in the objective world. While these poems are plainly spoken and unadorned, they are also full of fresh and vivid imagery. Poem-to-poem, this is a knock-out collection. And I look forward to the next and next and next book.”
— Martha Rhodes, author of The Thin Wall

“This marvelously ordered book by Willie Lin catalogs the ways and whys one comes to be. Her poems burrow slowly out of a fate irrevocable as ‘bees locked in amber,’ emerging hungry for self-imbued purpose, a task of a life that can be shared. ‘I want to give you a truth—not wing or hook— / that belongs to only you.’ And what beauty, what ‘goodly weight’ in this specific form of the truth: a gift to return to many times.”
— Philip Matthews, author of Witch

“To read Conversation Among Stones is to enter a precisely reasoned universe of thought and held objects. Being in the world and turning toward knowledge are linked: it is through the things and beings of the world that knowing happens. Willie Lin's specificity of vision gives us waxwings and gallstones and a ‘corrugated blue bicycle shed,’ green walnuts and the brightness of persimmons. In these poems of knowing and unknowing, Lin offers a way ‘to see in full what you've understood only in profile’ through attention that verges on grief. But attending to the world may deliver bewilderment, rather than certainty. As in dreams, proportions shift and metamorphoses take place. Migrations happen. Breakage occurs. Willie Lin's poems offer us the twinnedness of could-be and might-have-been with is, the bewildering promises of religious practice, and the vital mystery of one's parents' early lives. These beautiful, solemn poems are radiant with the precision of Lin's language and the clarity of her images.”
—Éireann Lorsung, author of The Century